Sunday Times University League Table

[thing47]

Just having a look at yesterday's new league table. No real surprises in the top 20, Surrey is the big mover just outside that, up from 32 to 22, and further down the list Northumbria has moved up from 62 to inside the top 50.

Universities of the year are Bath and NTU (Modern University of the Year).

The 'Best for Teaching Quality' sub-table made me take a second look, as with the exception of St Andrews the top 10 is all non-RG, lesser-known universities. But that category is student-assessed so I don't really see how many students are in a position to compare objectively how good their teaching is to another university…

Of course league tables have to be taken with a (large) pinch of salt, but always worth a glance.

Be aware, the Guardian league table deliberately omits the REF (research excellence) score. Which can mean that an apparently high-scoring university is not a research leader - which is then not actually an overall good university ... particularly for high-flyers who may wish to go on to postgraduate study.

Thanks,OP. The original article is behind a firewall so I can only see the overall ranking, posted elsewhere, and not the teaching ranking that you mention.

This is interesting. I’ve long thought Bath under-rated in my own and related STEM fields, so am delighted that they’ve been recognised as Uni of the Year. And there are some less pleasant surprises as well as pleasant ones - for example Edinburgh, Glasgow and Sheffield have seemed to me in recent years like great places for students. I had not realised any of them would rank so highly.

FWIW, absent a recent change, because it isn’t something I pay much attention to, I don’t think St Andrews is Russell Group either ( waits to be corrected). If that is right then apparently none of the top 10 unis for student assessment of teaching would be RG? Pretty interesting.

I agree that students cannot make teaching comparisons and I worry that RG universities may, in some disciplines, be damned for teaching a more demanding curriculum. But I very much doubt that is the full story. (My uni is RG)

I worry that RG universities may, in some disciplines, be damned for teaching a more demanding curriculum.

That is very much my experience, working in RG universities, but as External examiner, doing QAA visits, periodic quality overviews, and equivalency reviews,
for RGs and ex-polys in my time.

One might argue that this should be the basic assumption re teaching scores. The problem is, the NSS is an extremely blunt instrument. The questions are very broad, and students aren't really properly briefed or prepared for answering with full evidence/thought. I suspect they focus on the one or two times they've felt a mark is unfair, rather than giving a balanced overview.

I also think that students may know how they learn, but that they are not likely to understand what makes good teaching. Their answers are often quite a subjective record of what they enjoyed. Sometimes deep learning is difficult. That doesn't mean they were badly taught.

And we know that student surveys about teaching are better at indicating students' sexist & racist biases than they are at quantifying the actual quality of the teaching. Women have lower teaching satisfaction rankings than their male colleagues, even when their students appear to do better in assessments and degree results.

Having been through a degree reasonably recently, I don't pay much attention to individual tables or NSS scores, though I did do a thing for ds where I went through multiple rating tables for his subject to see which names came up most often.

The most useful rating I still think is A-level grade entry requirements.

Although @PermanentTemporary for those with lower A Level grades, prospective applicants/students might want to look at the "Value Added" KP, which gives some sort of metric to measure the difference between the A Level grades accepted for entry, and the achievement on graduation.

That's probably important for those students who would normally achieve at the mid to low 2, ii level. They might squeeze a 2, i

The original article is behind a firewall so I can only see the overall ranking, posted elsewhere, and not the teaching ranking that you mention.

Just for you @poetryandwine top 10 for teaching quality:
West London
St Andrews
Aberystwyth
Bishop Grosseteste
St Mary's, Twickenham
Hartpury
Plymouth Marjon
Wrexham Glyndwr
London Met
Robert Gordon

An interesting and eclectic mix, I would venture to suggest…

The most useful rating I still think is A-level grade entry requirements.

You think A level grade requirements are the best way to judge a university's quality? Really. I couldn't disagree more strongly with that. A level grades tell you precisely nothing about the quality of a degree, or the standard of the students graduating from it 3 (or 4) years later. The school you attend has a massive impact on your A level results, and we all know that not all schools are capable of enabling DCs to fulfil their potential. University education is also very different from school and may suit a completely different type of person.

Thanks very much for this lust, @thing47 . The RG should be humbled. It would be really interesting to know what lies behind it.

To some extent, I agree that AL grade requirements are a proxy for the perceived desirability of a UG degree programme. You can’t afford to be too choosy if that choosiness isn’t going to yield enough ‘bums on seats’ on Census Day, when fees fall due. But it is more subtle than that. Universities, and Schools within them, develop distinct identities. Oxford won’t deign to consider West London a competitor even though the latter may have the happiest students in the UK.

But how is the teaching quality measured?

There are no independent assessors going into universities. And, as a PP has indicated, students tend to use the NSS to reward courses they find easier, rather than those which are more challenging.

I think these league tables need looking at for each subject. My department, at an RG university, is regularly in the top 5 for the discipline. We're number 1 this year ... But there are other disciplines at my university which are never ranked so highly - even though, as a university overall, we generally do pretty well in national & international league tables.

Have a look at the individual KPIs:
The research ranking will tell you whether the teaching is at the cutting edge of research.
The Staff-student ratio (SSR), and the spend-per-student will tell you how the institution values that specific discipline (at my place, our SSR is high & spend per student is low, but we pull the rabbit out of the hat with student care).

Staff within a department are generally not in control of SSR and spend-per-student (as I always point out to the powers-that-be when we're hauled over the coals for anything less than a "Top 5" ranking).

My advice is that if you want to use league tables to chose your university - or influence your DC's choice - then you should interrogate the league tables at the level of
the specific discipline
the individual elements of the ranking & how they're collated

Don't just accept a single figure for the whole institution, and assume that applies to your chosen discipline.

Yes, I completely agree @BirdinaHedge , the merit of league tables (such as it is) lies in the subject-specific tables and drilling down into the details. Apart from anything else, you can find pockets of excellence in surprising places where a not-terribly-highly-ranked university is very good indeed in a particular area. I suspect (though this is harder to establish for certain) that there are also some very good universities which have one or two not very good departments within them… Possibly relying on reputation or past glories.

As an aside, I'm not convinced that research quality is a particularly useful category as far as under-grads are concerned. What your eminent professor is researching is unlikely to be relevant to a 19-year-old undergraduate; indeed, it might even be a negative as they will be more interested in their own research than in lecturing/tutoring. At post-graduate level, it is a different ballgame, there research quality is probably the single most important factor.

I don't think A level grades on entry is a useful criteria AT ALL on which to base your judgement of a uni!

Firstly, it's not A levels grades - it's average UCAS point tariffs, which includes UCAS points from things such as ABRSM exams, LAMDA, dance exams etc etc
DS's RG uni called him in the first week to establish what UCAS points he might have IN ADDITION to his A levels. He had lots, as he had Grade 8 in two musical instruments.
In reality this skews this measure towards grammar and independent schools where pupils are more likely to have these extra curriculars.

Also the UCAS points measure is suppressed when a uni makes a point of offering a number of contextual offers and, I think if they offer foundation courses for subjects. I'm sure I read this is why Bristol fell down the league tables a few years ago - because they were making a relatively high level of contextual offers?

I would say Research Quality measures and Employabiity of students are much better scores on which to base decisions?

The biggest problem with using UCAS grades as a measure is its over promotion of Scottish universities 9with largely Scottish student intakes with more UCAS points) in the tables (great for their reputation of course!)

Plus, there is no point in a student predicted BBB hankering after AAA institutions - this is a totally self selecting measure! Of COURSE Oxbridge does well on this as , of course, does any uni which sets its offer grades really high - which not all institutions can do.

I wholeheartedly agree with the post from @BirdinaHedge on 19/09. @thing47 raises an interesting question about the relevance of the research ranking for undergraduate studies. In theory I don’t necessarily disagree with her; some of the best undergraduate experiences in America are to be found at what are called the elite four year colleges (many also offer. Master’s degrees). Entry is incredibly competitive, fees are high as anything (usually with excellent aid), and it is all about the undergraduate experience. The education, including preparation for PG studies, is superb. Aside from the financial aspect, I wish we had something like this in the UK.

And yet. Having attended a research uni myself I think there is something in the idea that you are being taught by people who are themselves engaged in struggle, who don’t have all the answers, who know that learning (education for UGs, research for staff) is supposed to be a struggle and that not every problem has an answer. It is the opposite of handholding.

In a different time and place I was lucky enough to learn a bit of the great themes of my discipline when academics working in these areas had undergraduates around for meals and parties including good wine and the odd spliff. That would never do now, at least at my place. But the excitement of a research environment can definitely make a difference to bright undergraduates.

What your eminent professor is researching is unlikely to be relevant to a 19-year-old undergraduate; indeed, it might even be a negative as they will be more interested in their own research than in lecturing/tutoring.

I'm a relatively "eminent" professor (large research grants, international reputation, leader in scholarly organisations blah blah blah) and I teach my research to undergrads. I run what we call 'research-led' teaching & they love it. I share drafts of book chapters with them, I get them to contribute their work to my projects (if it's of sufficient standard). I test out my ideas with them, and tell them this is what "m doing.

With research-led teaching, undergrads learn from the person who is writing the books the students are reading for their essays.

@poetryandwine you're in STEM, aren't you? DD2 did a highly regarded STEM Masters at a world-leading university last year. The difference between that and her under-grad (at a good mid-rank, non-RG university) was exponential. She studied all hours, attended all sorts of guest lectures and seminars in the evenings and at weekends and was directly involved in her tutor's original research which has since been published.

But where she did her Masters doesn't teach undergraduate degrees so I have no direct comparison at that level.

@BirdinaHedge my apologies. I'm not sure you are the norm… but clearly then some lecturers do do this at undergraduate level. I do know in DD2's case that undergraduates would not be let loose on the high-tech, bio-secure lab equipment that she used during her Masters. Possibly at Oxford they might.

This is the most useful sentence on the thread and is my view too:-
"The most useful rating I still think is A-level grade entry requirements."
The harder to get into the better the place and the more likely you will go into high paid work.

Yrs, @thing47, I am. So glad your DD found the Master’s experience intense and, I infer, satisfying.

Xenia that's not quite what I meant in fact. All individual measurements are flawed. But entry grades are at least transparent, they allow a good course to show itself independently of the university and they show something about what a university is trying to do. I agree with the comment about 'added value' scores showing even more.

I wouldn't trust 'student satisfaction' as a rating of anything because it mushes together multiple factors, most of which are based on ratings by first year students who barely know which end is up.

Another rating I'd like to know but which they don't tell is 'how many applicants per academic job' - surely the word goes round about which universities are good to work at and support staff well etc.

I'm more interested in which universities don't cancel women speakers or staff due to "wrong think" and don't stifle free speech and value using your brain to form own opinons rather than go with mob thinking.

Any tables for that?

I'm more interested

It's not about what you are most interested in, unless you are 17/18 and applying to uni, really.

Doesn't that make the appearance of St Andrews on this list a little problematic?

Or is it a circular argument - of course all those lower-grade students at establishments 1 and 3-9 have ranked them highly because the teaching is shallow and there is a massive amount of handholding available, whereas the top-grade students at no.2 are able to appreciate the superior offering there and rank it accordingly?

Definitely problematic to take 1 (of 10) universities in a list and assume its students are applying different criteria from those being applied by students at the other 9…

But you raise an interesting point – is it possible that the teaching, in the strictest sense, at lower-ranked universities is better precisely because their students require being taught, in a school sense, whereas those at higher-ranked universities are presumed to be able to learn by themselves? ie the expectations of the lecturers as to what they need to do is very different?

@poetryandwine and @BirdinaHedge and others involved in university education, is that plausible?

is it possible that the teaching, in the strictest sense, at lower-ranked universities is better precisely because their students require being taught, in a school sense, whereas those at higher-ranked universities are presumed to be able to learn by themselves? ie the expectations of the lecturers as to what they need to do is very different?

I suspect this is quite possible. We were blown away by the standard of teaching at a "lower ranking" university (in asmuch as you can tell from an Open Day). It was virtually all small(ish) group sessions, all face to face, with lots of individual sessions with academics to the point where the students all got to know the staff pretty well. Compared to a "higher" ranking university where there were less teaching time in total and it was more large scale lectures, some still virtual and a very much more limited number of small group interactions - the onus being on self study and students taking responsibility for themselves.

The "lower ranked" university did amazingly well on the Student Satisfaction survey.

But DD is bright, and predicted high grades and, as this thread shows, lots of people think the better the profile of the intake, the better the university must be. Not to mention "big name" snob value. So she won't be applying to the lower ranking place. Or only as an insurance. But that's not to say I don't wonder if she might not do better there in terms of her actual education.

A useful parameter is the 'employability' ranking. There's a big variation between the highest and lowest ranked University. y the end of the day most students spend 3-4 years studying with a view to getting an enjoyable and well paying job.